Chances are if you have invested in Microsoft technology for your business you have come across SharePoint. You may know it for document management or you may have considered it for use as your organisations intranet. I thought it would be useful to share my thoughts with you on what your alternatives are. If you would like to find out more, register for one of our upcoming events or request a demo.
While Microsoft doesn’t actually promote it as a fully-fledged intranet product it can certainly be developed into one. Despite the investment in development time, many of the Nielsen Norman intranet design annual winners have carved their intranet out of SharePoint.
SharePoint has a few really smart features, real-time collaboration with colleagues using Microsoft Office files for example. It also has some major pains - upgrades, the time it takes to make anything useful – even the ease of use for anyone not technically inclined. These are just some of the reasons that cause frustration and lead people to look for SharePoint alternatives.
What can you expect from a SharePoint alternative?
Here at SORCE, our intranet software comes with ready-made intranet applications that get you up and running fast. Applications such as our contact directory, manages and stores contact information for colleagues across your business, and our event manager that lets you keep track of events (and will even manage room booking and resources, like projectors).
While ready-made intranet applications give you a platform for employees to share information with each other, what is often more crucial to the long term success of your intranet is the way it adapts to your ongoing business requirements. Something that many box product SharePoint alternatives lack is this flexibility, sticking instead to development lead by the intranet provider.
Our inbuilt application development environment is different. It allows you to easily change and adapt the intranet applications to suit the way you work, even building new applications if necessary. It also makes integration with other business systems simple, allowing you to bring information from across your business and display it within the intranet.
An area that SharePoint does really well is in document management. While our intranet software’s own document management application can rival SharePoint, if you are using SharePoint or Office 365 to manage your documents you don’t need to throw this away. We can integrate into SharePoint (or Office 365) to display these documents directly on your intranet.
I hope you have found this blog useful. If you are considering a SharePoint alternative, register for our next Looking Beyond Sharepoint event.